Creation

When I was young, I really, really liked Legos. I had Star Wars sets, Ninjago sets, Technic sets, and even vintage sets that I had received as gifts from my much older cousin. What was more important to me however, was the intentional agglomeration of these: a chaotic collection of various pieces from different eras and different ideas, that I tried my best to put together elegantly. As I grew older, my interest in Legos dwindled, but my love for building grew more fiery: and I was met with the world of Minecraft! A monstrously large world (roughly 60million by 60million by ~300 blocks) sat at my fingertips, quite literally. I particularly enjoyed Minecraft’s Redstone feature, which for those unfamiliar, allows players to create boolean logic gates and circuits (just short of turing completeness due to the lack of infinite memory), in turn, allowing for players to build rather complex contraptions such as sorting algorithms, piston doors, and various technologies. In more unmemorable periods of my childhood, I consider myself lucky to have filled these with the occasional artistic inspiration: oil pastel avocados and apples, pencil portraits, crayon van Gogh, etc. Together, these instances of creation forming a well fitting portfolio of my own creativity and subconscious aspirations.

Consumption

In highschool, I began exploring music and in particular, classical piano. I really enjoyed music from the romantic era: Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and other usual suspects. As my musicality grew, so did my appreciation for a wider range of composers such as Mozart\({}^{*1}\), and eventually to interpretations of different pieces\({}^{*2}\). Being able to enjoy certain interpretations of music over others was evidence of my growing musicality, and it certainly meant that I was able to pick up on what made a performance “good”. Last semester, I took formal piano lessons for the first time in a while, but I was conflicted. What does it mean to learn how to play piano? Should I learn how to perform or to play? Is there a difference? Does “playing piano” constitute one more than the other?

It was at this point that I came to a simple conclusion: a dilemma between being a consumer of “art” as opposed to being a creator of it\({}^{*3}\).

In any case, to “perform” music means to create, while, to “play” music means to consume. I “play” music because, like Legos, it was mentally stimulating and hence, fun and helped in relieving stress. But unlike my Legos, where I had a front seat in creation, I can easily say that my “playing” is not the same as “performing”. While I can certainly “play” piano, I don’t think I can “perform” it. For now, I am a consumer of music, not a creator. However, while most of this argument has been to acknowledge my own shortcomings of being a creator of music, I don’t believe either of creation or consumption can be better a better form of experiencing a “thing” than the other. Creation and consumption serve different purposes. For me and my piano playing, to consume music means to be able to feel the music, whether through playing or through listening; To create music means to be able to show other people how to feel the music.

Exploration

In college and hopefully long into the far future, I want to be learning and experiencing. While I began drafting this post believing that creation and consumption were the only two facets one should be concerned with when thinking about how to approach the many experiences in life, I forgot the very thing that perpetuates and allows for these to take place in the first place: exploration!

How is exploration different from consumption? Exploration is a broader, overarching term that tries to answer the question, “what experiences are out there?”, while consumption tries to answer the question, “what experiences do I want to keep having?”. The act of consuming a “thing” implies that you’ve experienced this “thing” before. Then, the act of creation tries to answer the question, “how can I share this experience with others?”. Perhaps, in a sense, if life is a collection of memories and experiences, then the following are also true:

1. Creation concerns the human identity in relation to sharing memories and experiences.
2. Consumption concerns the human identity in relation to picking and choosing past memories and experiences to re-experience.
3. Exploration concerns the human identity in building a personal index of the available memories and experiences that can be gathered as a result of being conscious.

Reflections

Albeit, the title for this post is a little brazen, but perhaps many things can be bucketed into these three ideas!

This blog post was initially drafted several months ago, after I began to think deeply about what it means to experience. More precisely, I wondered why some people enjoy consumption more than creation. Eating at restaurants vs. cooking your own food. Going to art museums vs. making your own art. Listening to music vs. singing & recording your own songs. Certainly, it’s more difficult to create, but if you’re pursuing consumption out of the experiences you will get by consuming, then an equal if not more fulfilling experience is waiting for you on the other side of creation. Or, so I believed. Naively, when thinking of these ideas, I thought, “surely creation is more fulfilling than consumption!”. Yet, I think my own experiences led me to create biases and subconsciously, prejudices (whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’) about people that did certain things, in certain ways. When I lay it out formally like this, I can better reason through my own biases and prejudices, and realize something intrinsic and foundational to living: the ability to experience and appreciate experiences. Then, it must not be the case that some people enjoy consumption more than creation or creation more than consumption: we simply enjoy chasing experience. In that sense, maybe those that consider themselves to be mainly consumers should try being creators, and those that consider themselves to be mainly creators should try being consumers.

Footnotes

_{^{\({}^{*1}\) Some might suspect that I did not like Mozart here, and while this was certainly true, I regrettably wish that I had listened to more Mozart when I was younger. Today, I can easily say that I have found an appropriate appreciation for Mozart.}}

_{^{\({}^{*2}\) To the non-musical people here, you might have always wondered why it’s interesting for musicians to listen to various different people play the same piece. After all, a composer writes music, the musician follows it… right? Not quite. A musician’s job is to take a composer’s music and “interpret” it. Like how literary scholars of today decompose Shakespeare and put it back together, musicians do something similar, except for music, resulting in really different perspectives on the same sheet of music.}}

_{^{\({}^{*3}\) Here, I use “art” as a general term that fits the following definition: anything that can be created and consumed. I really like this definition (I’m not sure if someone else had established this definition, but for now it’s my own) because it is broad enough to capture the essence of art. By this definition, mathematics is art, because people can both consume math (solve well established problems) and create math (research). Most mathematicians would argue that mathematics itself is a form of art, so no contradiciton here.}}